


Here There Be Witches, Can't You hear Their Cries

by CaptainLordAuditor



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Character Study, Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 16:40:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLordAuditor/pseuds/CaptainLordAuditor
Summary: After twenty three years, they caught up to the Hawke family.





	Here There Be Witches, Can't You hear Their Cries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



She doesn’t know how old she was when the Templars first came.

In truth, she was four, and her mother was pregnant, and they lost most of their material belongings when they’d had to flee from the village and pray the Templars didn’t get their blood. She has a distant memory of clinging to her mother with one hand and her toy druffalo with the other, crying for the blanket still two villages away.

That was the year Garrett died. Summer fever came and when it left, Marian was the only child that stayed behind, though she’d get more that winter.

The Templars kept coming, every few months, occasionally after two or three years or so, and the Hawkes kept leaving, sometimes a few few days, sometimes a few hours, once barely ten minutes ahead of them. She learned not to make friends; friends would be more likely to tell on the Templars, and Marian would have to leave them soon anyway.

When she was nine, Papa stopped making medicines and found a job as a farmhand. In their last village, someone had called the Templars on them for his medicines, even though there was no magic in them. The Templars had come, and poked through the things Papa hadn’t hidden, Papa and Mama and Marian shaking like leaves, though Beth and Carver were too young to know what was going on. The Templars had laughed, and let Papa off with a joke about how well herbalism worked, and everyone hid the biggest sigh of relief they’d had in their lives.

They still left three days later. Maybe someone had noticed something, after all.

When Marian was twelve and Bethany was six, Beth’s magic appeared. She was in the garden with Carver, and when she touched the fading, wilted roses of autumn, they’d bloomed into the full blossoms of early summer. When Mama saw, she shrieked and cut them off, and they left the next week.

Lothering was the longest, perhaps because of how close the Chasind were, people cared less. Five years in Lothering, five years of going to Chantry every week and staring down the Templars who sat across from her, silently planning the best way to take them down, defying them to do something about the girl who sat next to her under her protection. Three years without Papa, and five years of working, going to the Chantry when other people did so nobody would say they were godless, avoiding it the rest of the time, never seeking out company, though after a year she gave in to the idea of making friends and did her chores with the blacksmith’s daughter, talking about inanities.

Two years in Kirkwall, and they couldn’t last. Marian bites her lip and wears a stoic mask as the Templars catch up to them after twenty three years.

Maker damn them all. How will she go on?


End file.
